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Thanks again for your reply. Unfortunately this checks out too. I have the correct role, and even if I explicitly set the role to PLUSTRACE I still get the error. I CAN see the plan_table, but I still get the error (see below):

[you might want to check whether you have the right version of plan_table created.
I notice you ran $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/utlxplan.sql script to create plan_table,
so make sure you $ORACLE_HOME is set up correctly.

Not sure what happened here, but I dropped and recreated the user and all seems well. I must have missed something before, but I can't think what as it was all scripted and I used the same scripts. Anyway its OK now, thanks for your help.